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Marshall's Creek
Marshall's Creek was the name given to a short-lived 17th century settlement of English Puritans near the Suriname River in what is today the country of Suriname. The name survives, under various spellings in Dutch, as a Surinamese place name. It is known that the settlement was founded in 1630, making it the earliest documented European settlement in the Guianas, but information about how long it lasted is not readily available, if it is known at all. It is known that the settlers grew tobacco, and that it was led by (and probably founded by) a Captain Marshall. However, the captain's given name is not readily available, if it is known at all. Note In his online author notes for 1636: Seas of Fortune, Cooper notes that David Pieterszoon de Vries recorded having found a settlement of Englishmen under a Captain Marshall while exploring a "deep river" in October 1634. Marshall's Creek in 1632 Grantville's encyclopedias had no information about the Marshall's Creek settlement. Therefore, David Pieterszoon de Vries was surprised to find signs of European presence while traveling down the Suriname River in February 1634. After de Vries spent the night in the settlement, Marshall and one of his assistants, Francis Scott, went upriver to the site of Gustavus, where they were taken aboard the Walvis. There, they met privately with de Vries and Maria Vorst in the captain's cabin. At that meeting, de Vries, who already knew that Marshall's settlement had not received news from Europe since mid-1633, informed Marshall and Scott of the League of Ostend and the English and French betrayal of the Dutch fleet at Dunkirk. After concluding that neither settlement could easily dislodge the other, and that Gustavus undoubtedly controlled the mouth of the Suriname, the two began to reach toward a tentative neutrality agreement. This got a boost when Maria reminded them that they had a common enemy in the Spanish, and noted that Charles I of England probably didn't care what happened to them, as he had sold England's North American colonies to France. Marshall and Scott only accepted that because de Vries had saved newspaper accounts of it. That led to discussion of the English king's arrests of people who were known to have supported Parliament in the English Civil War. The two settlements were able to establish friendly relationships and traded with one another, with the Marshall's Creek area becoming a source of tobacco, cotton, and rubber for Gustavus. However, a potential source of future conflict is that Marshall's Creek had a small number of African "servants", who were actually slaves, while slavery was prohibited in Gustavus. The agreement between the settlements was that Gustavus would not insist that the slaves be freed or encourage them to run away, but would not return any who did. Notes *De Vries' reference to "Laud's and Wentworth's cronies" in February 1634 was based on the state of affairs in December 1633, when the Gustavus expedition left Europe. At that time, Thomas Wentworth and William Laud were secure in their positions. *Cooper does not note the arrival of any English ships from the establishment of Gustavus to the end of the "Stretching Out" part of Seas of Fortune in April 1637. On the other hand, no mention is made of the lack of such arrivals. It is possible that the yearly ships for Marshall's Creek stopped being sent in 1634; Marshall's Creek was even smaller and more remote than the English colonies in the Caribbean, and 1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies refers to those colonies being left on their own. However, that is not definitely mentioned, and it not definitely known. Category:1632 series